


all goes well

by Askance



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Art, Blood and Gore, Body Horror, Bugs & Insects, Collaboration, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-29
Updated: 2014-04-29
Packaged: 2018-01-21 06:57:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,989
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1541747
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Askance/pseuds/Askance
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>On the way to New Harmony, Dean laughs at a hearse, and he's not sure why.</p>
            </blockquote>





	all goes well

 

_Before_

Pit-stop in Odessa. Not for long. Just enough for fuel and bottles of water to soothe their nerves. There’s not much talk under the gas-station portico—just Dean, jittering, pacing back and forth past Sam’s looks of concern. Everything reeks of smog and wet concrete. The sun is out but it’s not doing much, just pulsing in the sky, feeble, anxious; Dean feels it like an eye on the back of his head.

About halfway to New Harmony. To Lilith. Sam presses a cold bottle into Dean’s hand and says, “Drink something. Please.” They climb back into the car and Dean feels the base of his spine start to prickle hotly, feels a weird despairing bubble in his gut. He hopes Sam can’t smell how terrified he is.

“You okay?” Sam says, all gentleness, even though he knows the answer.

In front of them, facing the road, traffic starts to slow at the lights; cars peel off and away around corners. They sit there, Impala rocking on her wheels in the humid wind. Dean feels as if she might tip over and blow away. Slowly a motorcade pulls up to the unassuming red light, like something out of a dream, pulling eerily out of the grey afternoon. Someone’s funeral procession.

“Dean?”

The light turns green and the motorcade rumbles on and the hearse rolls by with all the vigilance of someone staring at Dean from the street. Like it _knows._ The bubble in his stomach bursts and he laughs—a disgusting noise, a manic giggle, and then he goes quiet, horrified at himself.

“Don’t do that,” Sam says, softly, without conviction.

Onward.

* * *

 

_After_

It’s strange down here. Dark, for one thing. Cramped. No room to turn over and curl up the way he wants to.

Dean’s fairly sure this isn’t how death is meant to be.

He can’t move; he supposes that’s to be expected. He tries—concentrates on wiggling his fingers and toes, but nothing gives. He can move his eyes, but only a fraction, and there’s not much to see six feet under.

For a while he wonders if maybe Sam made a mistake and buried him alive—maybe that whole mess at the house in New Harmony was a fever dream—maybe Sam will come back any minute now, clawing at the dirt, yanking him up from his pine box, half-shouting _sorry oh my God I’m so sorry_ in that way he has. Maybe. He’ll wait. He doesn’t have much choice.

Funny—he’d thought being dead meant Heaven or Hell and nothing in between. There’s a kind of burn in his chest that he supposes might be his soul, down there, somewhere, on someone’s rack, connected by some metaphysical umbilical cord to its nest behind his ribs. He certainly can’t feel whatever’s being done to it. He can’t feel much of anything, except a cold, vague curiosity, a logic, an awareness without calculation.

He wonders if everyone is like this when they die. If their souls float away and they lie around in their coffins for years and years, eternal insomniacs, just waiting.

It’s not a bad idea, he thinks. There are worse things to do for all eternity.

Or maybe he’s unique. Or maybe someone’s put a spell on him, to keep him semi-alive. He tries to wiggle his fingers around, look for the plush of a hex bag near his arm, but of course he can’t.

Dean wonders if anyone will come to visit him. What will happen when there’s no one left to come visit.

It’s terribly lonely, being dead.

* * *

 

He can tell, after a few days, where the claws and teeth went into him, because those places sink down against his bones the fastest.

It’s damp, and cold; perhaps it rained; something is dripping onto his face from the boards above his head, at least, like Chinese water torture, though it doesn’t bother him much. It’s nice, to feel something different. When his skin falls away and his bones go dry he figures he won’t be able to feel much of anything. Relish it while he can.

He thinks about that hearse in Odessa, how it seemed to have been looking at him with those dark windows as it crawled beneath the green light, and now he wonders why he laughed. There’s nothing funny about being in this box. He knows that now.

* * *

 

Time is an acute sensation. Dean can feel it crawling over him like something with a thousand legs. It winds up from his ankles around his thighs and past his hips and chest and throat and face and all the way down again, every second a twitch against his skin. The blood has long since dried inside his wounds beneath the shirt Sam put him in and that itches, too, pulls at the flesh and coagulates and scabs.

He’s been here about a week. It’s apparent now that Sam isn’t coming back to retrieve him.

There’s a leak in the coffin and certainly it _must_ have rained recently because there’s groundwater pooling underneath him—he can feel bits of root and dirt floating in it when it soaks around his limp fingers. Dean wonders what will happen if the coffin fills up all the way with water. Will he drown? Is that possible?

His back is sore and he wants to curl up on his side, draw his legs up to his chest, relieve it, but he can’t—his feet are pressed against the base of the box and his head against the top and there’s nowhere to go. Eventually his spine will fall apart with no more organs and flesh to weigh down on it and then he’ll be comfortable but for now being dead is extremely unpleasant.

Dean knows how this works—how things go from rigor mortis on, how things swell up from the inside and turn blue and fat and vile, how carrion creatures move in in swarms, how they pick the bones clean and then leave them to turn to dust in their own time. At least, if he was dust, he could float away on this leaking groundwater and go somewhere else, be something else, maybe nurture a patch of weeds or wind up in someone’s crops. If he could move his mouth enough to laugh a little he would—imagine, someone plucking an apple from a tree and biting in, and eating _him,_ somehow.

Something twitches under his hand, something long and wet. He’s almost relieved. The worms are here.

At least he’s not alone anymore.

* * *

 

The worms move in like tenants flocking to their landlord and they find their way to his insides quicker than he’d have expected. Long slimy blind things nudging into the gashes in his stomach and his chest and wriggling down into his guts and twining around them, nibbling gently, ticklish in a way that time isn’t. Privately, he welcomes them—names them, each one, though he can never remember the names a moment later—he takes a bland sort of amusement in knowing where they are at any given time. They nest in his stomach most nights, a whole coil of larvae. Dean hopes they’re comfortable. They make him feel warm and loose, as if he could come apart any minute.

He thinks about the hearse in Odessa while they make their way up him, crawling out of his slack mouth to creep into his nostrils, his eye sockets, his ears. (He doesn’t wish them any ill. They’re only doing what they know how to do—eat and invade.) He thinks about that weird desperate bubble in his gut, his laugh, how Sam had asked him not to do that, not to laugh at death. He wonders, now, why he’d been so scared—death, at least on his end of things, is not so bad. The burn in his chest suggests otherwise but the soul is a separate thing, Dean thinks, and he is well content to lie here and be taken apart, if that’s all that this is.

Eggs are laid on the bottoms of his eyelids, like little white tears.

* * *

 

It’s been a very long time. His whole body is alive, but not with him—with maggots and larvae and curious earthworms prying in, things with hundreds of legs, blind things, hungry things. He hopes that Sam doesn’t come back to see him, now. He wouldn’t want him to see him in this state.

His eyes are gone. Something ate them a few weeks ago, methodically, from the inside. Not that it matters. It’s all darkness down here anyway.

The burn in his chest is different, now. He wonders what is happening to his soul. It’s gotten sharper, darker; as much as he is able to dislike anything, he dislikes it.

Dean rolls the stages over in his head. Soon he’ll be a carcass and the worms will lose interest and leave him be and he’ll rot in his own juices for a while. He dreads it. At least while the bugs are here he has a sensation of movement; when they are gone it will be stillness, awful stillness, forever.

He hopes Sam will not come back but he also wishes, a little, that he would—if only to rearrange his corpse in a more comfortable position every now and then; sit with his feet in the dug-up grave and talk to him; let the sun shine on what’s left of him, maybe. It’s terribly lonely, being dead.

It would be nice to climb out of this box and go back to being a person again, even with his eyes and toenails and tongue missing, even with his stomach and his liver and his heart all gone. Sit in the shade with his brother. The tenuous stretch of his soul hanging down into the Pit bothers him like an itch at the back of his skull—though maybe it’s the worms; he cannot tell. He knows he doesn’t want it back inside him. It’s different now. Ugly.

Something almost like panic growls a little in him. He’s never been a claustrophobic but he’s getting there, down here, in the dark, the cold, the wet, the rot. If only he could curl up on his side; if only he could pick the wriggling maggot out of the gape of his tear duct, he could bear it, but it’s harder every day, every night.

He supposes there’s a reason burials are so important in all those cultures Sam reads about so often in his books. Payment for the ferryman, jars for the organs, cairns and mausoleums, bodies exposed to mummifying wind and sand. Those people had it down, he thinks. They knew what being dead was really like. They made it so comfortable.

In some places, he remembers, when a person died, their slaves and wives and concubines would be killed and put inside the tomb, to keep that person company. All he has are insects growing fat on him, sucking on his skin, cleaning out his skull.

He misses Sam. He misses change.

* * *

 

Pit-stop in Odessa. Why had he laughed? Fear, panic—all those things replaced with slime and bone and worms. The burn in his chest has turned full-black.

 _Don’t do that_ , Sam had said. He wishes now that he hadn’t. Maybe that’s the reason he’s still awake in this box in the damp in the mud.

* * *

 

He doesn’t see the light when it comes. He has no eyes left. He just feels it—feels it in the way the worms scatter from the open pit of his abdomen down into the safer dark, a blue finger of something piercing through the pine wood over his face, slicing off the drip-drip-drip of the water, laying out across his skull like a warm hand.

All his awareness snaps off like the needle being yanked from a spinning record. A cascade of relief.

* * *

 

Onward.

**Author's Note:**

> [Collaboration between [Tania](http://octopifer.tumblr.com) and I as a gift for [Casey](http://whiskyandoldspice.tumblr.com), inspired by the lyrics of "The Hearse Song." Art by Tania, fic by me.]


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